Overeducation?

Posted on December 26, 2002 in The InterNet

chari described the latest blogger Satan, Elizabeth Osder, as one of “the over-educated”.

I’m not sure that’s the word I’d use. As I pointed out to her in the comments for that article, I’ve met well educated professors who supported my early work as an “independent journalist” and who saw the web as a wonderful phenomenon because it got people into the art of writing letters again.

What Osder’s flippant comment about “navel-gazers” shows is not overeducation, but overnarrow education. She flunks compassion.

This is one of the reasons why I think we should be extremely careful about who we promote as professors and what degrees we hand out. As I stated, journalism would be better served by insisting on educations in specific fields such as political science, anthropology, sociology, etc. than by trying to carve out a province for themselves whose main purpose appears to be welfare for those terminally unable to get along with others or a mallet to silence criticism (as Osder has so wielded her position).

The world is filled, alas, with people who think that their training puts them above criticism by ordinary mortals. In a piece I wrote about cross-cultural attitudes regarding mourning, I described such a person in action:

We were on a train, riding third class through fields of tobacco, sunflowers, and maize. Our destination was Osijek, Croatia, and we were three: my wife, myself, and a psychology grad student who spoke Croatian. Our psychologist associate began to talk to one of our fellow passengers, a broad middle-aged woman in black. The topic was the horror of the war whose edges cut deep into the Croatian lifestyle. The grad student set herself to the task of making this woman talk about her recent losses of family and home. She succeeded, I regret to say. The woman broke into tears. We arrived a few minutes later and left the war victim weeping at the station.

I ache for that woman.

I remember the psychology student’s triumphant smile and think it unwarranted.

Everywhere in my journies through Croatia that year, I saw the wreckage; bomb craters in the street; starred bullet holes in the walls; plywood covering broken windows; the many new rows of tombstones in the city cemetery; house, shops, offices, and churches reduced to piles of brick, fractured concrete, wood, glass, and dust. This world was an open sore. What impressed me was the resolve of the people to rebuild, even as shells fell upon them. Pain and destruction filled their lives. Under fire from the Jugoslav National Army and under the strictures of martial law by their own troops, civilians set about their own, powerful grief therapy, the work of rebuilding their towns.

Later that year, after I had returned home, I read about how rape victims had been brought out to speak at a painful news conference and then just sent back to the camps, their political usefulness at an end.

I don’t think this woman needed to “talk about it”. She needed space in which to forget, to return to life.

Psychologists who work extensively with survivors of abuse report that their patients have problems forgetting about what happened to them. The clients recall all too well the strange tortures devised by mad parents and strangers. They can talk about it and talk about it. What they want to do is forget the horror, to have a placid life free of old, dangerous visions.

I recall a certain tension in that moment. I felt the student was “showing off”. The fact that I had no psychiatric or psychological training (I had merely considered it briefly as a profession but decided against it because of my tendency to empathize) put me in a spot where I felt I could not say “Stop this. You’re hurting her and you’re hurting me.”

I should be able to do that, even when the professional in question is a well-qualified doctor or lawyer. Certainly, no journalist that I know should be allowed to throw her or his paper at us and say that we’re useless because we don’t have it.

Blogging is showing that journalism is badly in need of reform. Some journalists, frustrated by the obstacles placed in their paths, have formed organizations such as FAIR which attempt to point out overlooked stories. They provide a model for those of us who want to challenge the mediocrity of the mainstream media. You won’t find wild conspiracy theories at FAIR, but you will find a story written in 1999 detailing the prevarications and closet segregationism of Trent Lott.

But even FAIR fails to credit the role bloggers played in getting the story out. It is, after all, staffed by professional journalists who may be just as threatened by us as are the establishment types.

I suspect Osder hopes to achieve two things with her remarks and position: to strike fear into the hearts of those on the outside who would comment on the way the press has failed to adequately research and report the news; and to present herself as a high priestess to those who put too much credence in such things, to place herself above criticism.

I do not doubt that Osder intends to use her position to teach others, but if she is to gain respect outside journalism and its academic departments, she is going to have to be prepared to learn from us.